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Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
When you are numb, techniques that ask you to notice what you feel in your body have very little to work with, because the noticing is the part that has gone offline. Sound arrives without needing it. People tend to describe the change as things slowly having colour again rather than as anything dramatic.
'In it there will be [the gift of] tranquillity from your Lord' (Quran 2:248). Something arrives from outside when nothing can be raised from within.
البقرة
وَقَالَ لَهُمۡ نَبِيُّهُمۡ إِنَّ ءَايَةَ مُلۡكِهِۦٓ أَن يَأۡتِيَكُمُ ٱلتَّابُوتُ فِيهِ سَكِينَةࣱ مِّن رَّبِّكُمۡ وَبَقِيَّةࣱ مِّمَّا تَرَكَ ءَالُ مُوسَىٰ وَءَالُ هَٰرُونَ تَحۡمِلُهُ ٱلۡمَلَٰٓئِكَةُۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَأٓيَةࣰ لَّكُمۡ إِن كُنتُم مُّؤۡمِنِينَ
Their prophet said to them, ‘The sign of his authority will be that the Ark [of the Covenant] will come to you. In it there will be [the gift of] tranquillity from your Lord and relics of the followers of Moses and Aaron, carried by the angels. There is a sign in this for you if you believe.’
Qur’an 2:248read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A psychophysiological study across the anxiety spectrum found that people with broad chronic distress showed blunted rather than exaggerated defensive reactivity. Blunting is a real pattern, not just a word people use about themselves. What that study cannot tell you is which treatment suits a blunted system, so the matching advice here rests on clinical experience.
McTeague LM, Lang PJ. (2012). The anxiety spectrum and the reflex physiology of defense: from circumscribed fear to broad distress.. Depression and anxiety doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
It comes in through hearing, which does not require you to be able to feel your body first.
A child who does not feel safe cannot filter the room. The pencil scratch, the scraping chair, the fan and the rustle of a coat all arrive at the same volume as the teacher.
Unfinished defence tends to park somewhere specific: a jaw that will not unclench, arms that never got to push, legs that never ran.
Breathing that has gone almost invisible happens in both kinds of stillness, so it will not tell you which one you are looking at. Muscle tone will.